One in four have £95 in the bank – so why are we charging them £1500 tenancy deposits?

Edinburgh and Brighton are the most expensive places in the UK outside of London when it comes to moving house – with lanlords and letting agents limiting customers to people with £2500 to hand for a tenancy deposit!

Landlords and letting agents in Britain’s biggest cities are limiting potential tenants to people with an average of £1500 available for a tenancy deposit – at a time when one in four families has an average of £95 of savings.

Edinburgh and Brighton are the most expensive large cities to move house, with Bradford and Hull the cheapest

New research we’ve carried out at my deposit free renting firm Dlighted shows that the average tenancy deposit in the UK’s 20 biggest cities currently stands at £1407 – rising to £1536 if London is included.

The news comes as figures from insurer Aviva recently revealed that one in four British families have just £95 in savings.

Dlighted’s data shows Edinburgh (£2631) and Brighton (£2589) to be the most expensive cities outside of London to move house – followed by Manchester (£1834), Cardiff (£1825) and Leeds (£1814)

Hull and Bradford (£684) are the cheapest places in the UK to move house, followed by Stoke (£797), Sunderland (£855) and Derby (£891).

The League table for the highest deposit costs in Britain’s biggest cities (excluding London) is as follows.

Edinburgh (£2631)

Brighton (£2589)

Manchester (£1834)

Cardiff (£1825)

Leeds (£11814)

Coventry (£1702)

Bristol (£1617)

Birmingham (£1449)

Newcastle (£1416)

Plymouth (£1283)

Liverpool (£1224)

Leicester (£1217)

Glasgow (£1205)

Sheffield (£1170)

Swansea (£1148)

Derby (£891)

Sunderland (£855)

Stoke (£797)

Bradford/Hull (£684)

As Managing Director of Dlighted I have this to say.

“Landlords and letting agents have really got to ask themselves whether it’s good business to ask tenants to pay sixteen times their total life savings to become their customers, when zero deposit renting using deposit replacement insurance gives them almost 400 times as much protection against unpaid rent, property damage.

“Doing things this way doesn’t just make it harder to find tenants, by forcing them into debt or financial dire straits just to become your customers it makes it harder to keep them too.

“Dlighted is the only deposit free renting firm where renters don’t pay a penny – unless they actively decide to take out one of our low-cost policies. But this doesn’t just benefit them – it benefits their landlords and letting agents too.”

Dlighted will publish deposit figures for London boroughs in the coming weeks.